


so do you like girls

by atiredonnie



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Friends to Enemies to Friends to It's Complicated to Lovers, girls being stupid and gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:27:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24256642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atiredonnie/pseuds/atiredonnie
Summary: Buffy Summers is desperate, dejected, and tired of being offered tea. Faith Lehane is weak in the knees for one Buffy Summers and doesn't even know how to hold a teacup.
Relationships: Faith Lehane/Buffy Summers
Comments: 19
Kudos: 116





	1. they're not feelings i have in vain, you know

**Author's Note:**

> i'm having fuffy feelings sooo here's a short multi-chapter fic for them. this is something i'm doing in my spare time at the same time as many other more pressing projects, so don't expect quick updates. do feel free to enjoy, however.

The good thing about living in an overheated tin can held together by nothing but twine and hope is that it’s hard to go much lower.

Your daily routine goes something like this:

Wake up. Stumble out of bed in a daze. Walk into the kitchen in your underwear. Make scrambled eggs with the texture of rubber. Burn them. Fish your ten-dollar margarita mix out of the fridge. Pour yourself a tall glass of fruity bullshit and add some shrimp for flavor. Drink the margarita with a side of shrimp and eat your eggs. Hobble outside like a drunk. Realize you’re in your underwear. Realize you don’t care very much, but go inside and change anyway because the fact that you don’t care is somehow grating really hard at your sense of self. Pull on pajama bottoms. Hobble outside like a drunk again. Smoke a cigarette. Yell at the kids across the street chucking rocks at the chainlink fence separating your pile of metal and rubble from the civilized world. Wonder why the kids are up so early. Realize it’s 2 pm. 

It’s 2 pm and you are doing jack shit with your life.

Head back inside. Beat up your punching bag, which is probably the most expensive thing you own. Pummel it until your breaths come out strange and stifled like someone’s clamping down hard on your lungs. Hose yourself down in the backyard. Make yourself garbage-pretty in the mirror, the sort of painfully disgusting pretty that inebriated boys and girls think is cool enough to sleep with, but in the morning is clearly just a bouquet of messy punk sadness tied together with barbed wire and the melted-down remnants of deodorant bottles. The good things about making yourself garbage-pretty are that you don’t have to worry about smudging your eyeliner, and the same thing that living in an asphalt trailer trailer park has going for it - the inability for life to get any fucking worse. 

B doesn’t like the kind of girl you are, but that’s okay, because B doesn’t like girls anyways. You thought - well, when you were sixteen, you thought maybe that you were the one who would finally fuck up her perfectly cultivated Kinsey scale -1. She danced with you and fucked shit up with you and punched you in the face once, which is pretty much as close to a marriage proposal as you can get, you reckoned back then. She would give you little looks and laugh at your stupid jokes and tuck her hair behind both ears when she saw you. Girl went pink. But then you ruined it, went a little bit darker than she could ever stand, and now B is - well. B is straighter than ever, blonder than ever, still locked in symbiosis with that bleached prick with that stupid jacket, even when he’s dead. Train left the station, Faith, you tell yourself. 

And so you don’t bother her. 

She’s off somewhere in England, last you heard from - well, not from. Of her. She and her ragtag gang of potentials scattered the second that school bus screeched out of Sunnydale. You would’ve scattered with them if it weren’t for the way Buffy looked at that crater in the earth. The tenderness. She loved that piece of shit with that upper crust accent and staying with her knowing she’ll always be thinking of his noble fucking sacrifice is not something you’re selfless enough to bear. So instead you set out for scrubby, wasteland California, the parts of the sunshine state that go unacknowledged on airport postcards. You live in a trailer park that never stops smelling like smoke and you bag groceries at the shittiest, dinkiest little Walmart imaginable that doesn’t even care that you show up drunk as a skunk half the time. And it’s all fine. You spend your Walmart money, along with the little funds you let accumulate in a bank account while serving your stint in prison, on shrimp and alcohol and deodorant. You have a fake name and you dyed your hair dark red and none of the cops bother to look for you because really, the state of California has bigger convicts to worry about than a 20-ish year old girl with a few charges of assault, not in the least because of the constant stream of apocalypses and the fact that every 20-ish year old girl that looks like you has a few charges of assault under her belt too. 

It’s not a life you’d wish on anyone, but it’s yours. 

Sometimes, in the early hours of the morning when the stars haven’t decided to leave yet, you think about turning yourself in, naked on your shitty mattress with a cheap fan plastering your sweat to your body like a cocoon. You think about redemption, how apparently living your life in a gross orange jumpsuit breaking the noses of women twice your age when they try to shiv you in the gym is penance. You think in those mornings that you’re still bad, that you’re rotting, that if someone were to open you up everything inside would be carrion and flies. But recently it’s been getting easier to convince yourself that repentance isn’t a women's prison. Repentance is living your life in squalor, and when someone knocks on your door asking for help, you fucking answer.

No one knocks on your door asking for help, but the point is that they could. 

It’s getting closer and closer to that early morning, and the sky above you is ripening, like a bruise, maybe, or a peach. You’ve never been one to spin words, but when you do, they’re usually about violence. You’re all dolled up - you think distantly that you were planning to go out, but your energy has completely exited you. So instead you slap some mayonnaise in between two hamburger buns and call it dinner. 

No one knocks on your door asking for help. Buffy Summers just bursts in. 

“Faith,” she says desperately, hair undone and eyes wild, “Faith-” 

What can you say? Buffy Summers makes you weak in the knees. You rush forwards and she crumples against you, heaving, shaking, manicured nails digging deep into your bare skin. It’s quite literally been years since she’s been this close to you and the smell of her, the feeling of her hair on your shoulders, her body on yours, is entirely unraveling you. “Whoa, B, what the hell?” You manage as she shakes in your arms. “Was this a planned trip or something? Cuz I didn’t exactly get a call-” 

She extracts herself from you, like there’s strings tied to her joints and someone’s pulling them all at once. Seeing her now, no longer wrapped around you, you realize how unbelievably awful she looks. Her coat is haphazard, hair long and tangled, eyes desperate, searching. She looks like she’s been dragged through a goddamn paper shredder, and a feeling of dismay pounds away at you. She looks like you, distant and incomplete, and that’s never a look you wanted Buffy Summers to sport. 

“Wasn’t planned,” she says shortly, and god did you miss her voice. “Didn’t call. I wanted out. Away. Figured you knew a bit of something about that.” 

She doesn’t deliver the last statement with any venom, just tired knowing, but it hurts anyways. You stifle a flinch, wondering privately when you got so damn weak. Few years ago, you would’ve treated that like a compliment. 

“Any specific reason why?” You intone. Buffy just stares up at you, eyes heavy lidded, empty. Like someone’s peeled her heart with a fucking bottle opener. “I bet you can think of some.” She says flatly. “Take your pick. My pathologies? Not exactly a secret around here.” She pauses. Frowns. “Around anywhere, I guess.” “Yeah, but it takes a special kind of setback to send you running into my arms, B.” She quirks an eyebrow. “Yeah, well, maybe I just wanted someone who would sweep me off my feet.” You gesture wildly around at your pigsty of a home. “Sorry, B, not exactly one for sweeping. Why are you here?” It’s just the first of your many questions, which include gems like “Can I follow you back,” and “Does this mean you’re desperately in love with me,” or “If not, can we at least hook up?”. But you leave those ones out. 

Buffy locks eyes with you for a second, before collapsing on your raggedy-ass sofa, making the same sound as a deflating balloon. “Aesop demon. One of the empathetic kinds. Searched my brain and hit me with a ton of my old, awful emotions at once from like a year ago. Now I’m Depresso-Girl, again, and everyone keeps trying to offer me tea.” She pauses. “I don’t even like tea.” Buffy looks up at you, desperate and imploring, and you think the demon might’ve hitched a ride because it’s like every gooey teenage feeling you had for Buffy Summers is flowing back to you. Her eyes are still so blue. It’s downright criminal. 

“I don’t think you even know how to hold a teacup,” she says flatly, and it’s the kind of thing that should bring you down to earth from your crushy gay joyride, but it really, really doesn’t. “You’re the only human being I know who doesn’t give a shit about comforting me. And I could use that right now.” You hesitate. It’s true. Girl’s got you pegged, hopefully in more ways than one by the time this night is over. You never really cared about making Buffy feel better. Just about her, honestly, and isn’t that pathetic. Every emotion she’s ever had was just a facial expression you liked on her more, and though you’re miles away from being a therapist you’ve always figured that it’s better to let her feel it than to shove it down. 

And it’s true. You don’t know how to hold a teacup. 

“So what’s the plan, B?” you ask, leaning easily against your countertop. “Come to party hard and trash some stuff? Because you know I’m always down for that. Good people can still go wild every once in a while,” you add. It sounds stupid even as you’re saying it, but you hope B knows too little about badness to buy it. She makes a little annoyed noise and some god-forsaken part of you melts. Jesus. “Not exactly. I’d just like to be here, for a little while. If that’s okay.” She glances sideways at you, and okay, she has to be doing it on purpose now. She has to know that you could never say no to a look like that. A face like that. 

“Sure.” You say. And, attempting to score at least a tiny victory over the weak parts that make up your stupidly gay ecosystem, you add a “You’re sleeping on the couch.” 

Buffy sleeps on the couch, but the way she looks with her face scrunched up against the pillow cushions make it clear that not a single victory’s been earned.

It’s gonna be a hard few weeks.


	2. kidz bop cask of amontillado

You wake up the next morning to a sight you honestly had thought you’d never see again. A sight tailor-made for people far more stable and responsible than you. Out of all the things to wake up to, you wake up to the sunrise. 

It’s Buffy, you decide, right then and there. Buffy’s destabilizing influence, the thought of her hair and her arms and her face flush up against couch cushions, somehow misaligned your internal clock and now you’re greeting the day at the same time as five year old boys and people who practice tai chi. 

When you wake up, you know it’s for good. Your heart jitters like a raccoon on LSD, an awful anxiety permeating every inch of you. That’s how it always is. You wake up wanting, shaking, something in your rib cage rattling like loose teeth in a glass jar. It’s disorienting. You don’t enjoy the sensation. Most of the time, though, it goes away after an hour or so of sluggish movement, of mental stimulation or sometimes just punching drywall until the shower caves in. It takes energy, but the uncertainty leaves. 

Sometimes it doesn’t. Those are the bad days. On days like those you sit in your bed, shaking, smoking, scattering ashes on your ratty bedspread and begging to every shitty, invisible, intangible god out there to stop poking at your heart like a neurosurgeon who decided to become a superhero villain halfway through an operation. Those days suck, and by the end of them you’re often wild with fear and palpable weakness, clinging to something other than the quick steps of your goddamn heartbeat so hard the pads of your fingers burst open like ripe fruit. Those are the days you think about going on Adderall. 

Whatever. Buffy’s here. You aren’t going to let it be one of those days. She’s actually counting on you for something, for once in her life, and if she sees you grappling, scraping, wild - well. Doesn’t matter. Because, you proclaim to yourself, it’s not gonna fucking be like that. You are exiting the realm of like that. So you wrench yourself out of bed, eyes crusty with sleep, and make for the back door. You don’t know whether your shorts are actually shorts or borrowed boxers, but it’s fine. No one awake at this hour’s going to want to get close enough to you to see anyways. 

The state of California seems to have received the many heat complaints from residents, you think to yourself wryly as you step into your pathetic yard, but is stubbornly refusing to institute better weather at any time other than fuck-early o’clock anyway. Likely out of spite. But while it’s fuck-early o’clock, well. It’s just beautiful then. As beautiful as a gnarled knot of dried-out tin and dirt masquerading as a trailer park can get. The cicadas are screaming and the grass is the color of piss, rubbing sores into your feet you know will linger like a lousy hookup, but the sky looks like a second grader’s art project in the best way possible. Nothing but paint and wayward smudges of watercolor, blending together in blue-orange-pink. In just a few hours that gorgeous sky will be eye-watering blue, and every color of the sun will coalesce into blinding, awful yellow, but right now, right here, running on less than five hours of sleep, you think you’re beginning to understand why any human being might go out of their way to wake up at fuck-early o’clock. 

Of course that understanding breaks apart like a party popper on New Year’s Eve after a few seconds of humble reflection, because it’s still, you know, heinously early, and your broken circadian cycle that ensures that you won’t get a single second more of shut-eye seems to be mocking you from your core. Stupid, pretty Buffy. Stupid teenage crush awakening from forced slumber at the sight of her heart-shaped face. And speaking of hearts, stupid that. Rattling away. A pinball machine, going ping-ping-ping, every inch of you, every individual bone. 

But it’s fine. It’s fucking fine, because waking up this early, violently shoved out of sleep, means that you actually have a chance in hell at executing the plan that began to take root in your brain when you collapsed into bed last night and fermented while you slept, emerging fully-formed with the morning. An entirely garbage plan, but one that you are committed to, one that you’re scouting out rings for, that’s how committed you are. 

It probably won’t work. But even if it doesn’t the sight of it will make Buffy laugh and the thought of claiming a laugh from her, at you, is a victory. That’s how your interactions with Buffy end up, most of the time. You look at them like there are points, and coaxing some kind of reaction out of her is at least one. It’s maybe a fucked up way to approach this interpersonal relationship, you suppose, but you can’t help it. It’s Buffy. Everything concerning her makes you a bit more fucked up than you maybe would be without her. 

Okay. That settles it. No turning back now. Rings. Proposals. Commitment. 

You’re going to make Buffy pancakes.

A couple of months ago, at some frat party a girl you hooked up with in a Taco Cabana bathroom invited you to, said girl’s ex-boyfriend attempted to brain you with a lamp shaped like Little Bo Peep. Something about being a fucking lesbo and ruining his life, even though despite being pretty drunk at the time you were pretty convinced that his life and relationships being ruined was an event set into motion several years before you had even visited a Taco Cabana, let alone made out with a crying goth chick in one. The details of it don’t really matter, you reckon. What does matter is that after he missed your head because even after you burned your way through two bottles of Jack Daniels you were still sprier than a weeping college freshman with an unhealthy obsession with his lesbian ex, you reached backwards, groping for the first blunt object you could find. And what came into your hand, delivered as if by God, was The Joy of Cooking. And what came upon his head, too, was The Joy of Cooking. At the time you were having a bit of a thing about collecting trophies, but his scattered teeth seemed a bit too disgusting, so instead you yoinked the cookbook and hightailed it out of there before someone inevitably called the cops. 

You’ve been using it mainly as a source of cheap napkins and on occasion toilet paper, but it’s a big book. And even after months, recipe after recipe remain. 

Like, you know. The one for pancakes. 

You walk back inside on unusually buoyant feet, making a beeline for the kitchen. The Joy of Cooking awaits, tattered though it may be, and you thumb through it eagerly until you finally land on pancakes, and then shift your focus down to Ingredients. 

Good news: You do, in fact, have eggs. 

Bad news: You don’t have flour, or sugar, or literally anything else you need to make pancakes. Shit. 

You attempt to force your brain to even begin to acknowledge the stupidity of what you’re doing - going to the grocery store at six in the morning, wearing nothing but boxers and an oversized tee proudly declaring across your noticeably braless chest its intentions to Keep Austin Weird, in order to buy sugar and flour and milk to make pancakes for a straight girl who is so completely and all-consumingly straight that she won’t even begin to consider the idea that the pancakes are a come on, a straight girl who’s only sleeping on your ugly couch because you’re the only person she knows who also thinks that tea just tastes like flower petals dipped in water. Your brain politely declines the offer of acknowledgement, and instead only suggests that you at least put on shoes. 

You do. 

The nearest grocery store also happens to be your only current site of employment, which means it’s a five-minute jog away. Your last shift you locked a toddler in with the chilled yogurt to make a statement to your annoying co-worker about how it really wasn’t necessary for him for him to repeatedly attempt to invite you to his rendition of the Cask of Amontillado on Thursday night, partially because you will never, ever give a shit about a single crusty Victorian-era short story, and partially because his breath smelled too much like garlic. The shift before that you simply failed to show up. Reflecting back on it now, you’re not sure which was worse. 

But whatever. You’re off-duty. Let your manager send you dirty looks while you shop for milk in someone else’s underwear. In the privacy of your own mind, you’ll be bludgeoning him with The Joy of Cooking, so who’s really the winner here. 

You approach the grocery store with trepidation, wallet burning a hole in the bare skin you pressed it up against, because boxer shorts don’t actually have pockets, so you just sort of shoved in the waistband flush against your midriff on the way out. You can do this. You killed a man, for fuck’s sake, you broke out of prison and killed a man in Los Angeles by pressing on his eyeballs so hard with the pads of your thumbs that they just collapsed under you, windows to the soul rendered rotting egg whites. You can buy milk. 

You step inside, frigid air-conditioning greeting you like an overly friendly uncle at a family picnic. You know this place like the back of your hand. You flit from aisle to aisle, impatient, grabbing sugar - milk - flour. You resist the urge to shoplift Spearmint gum. You fail to resist the urge and, needing to feel like you’re in control of something for once in your life, you crouch behind an aisle of baby formula and shove the entire packet of shitty gum into your mouth, cardboard and all. Your eyes water. Predictably, it doesn’t go down easy. It goes down burning, and you try very hard not to burst into tears over paper rasping a trail down your esophagus. You wonder if spearmint is classified as acid in any foreign country. You wonder what you’re doing here, on the ground, pressed up against grocery store tile, like you’re praying, like you’re looking for something resembling salvation. Buffy, and everything she represents, feels very far away. 

You consider locking yourself in with the chilled yogurt. Call it penance. Whatever. 

You pay for your flour. You pay for your eggs. And when you return home, eyes still watering, Buffy is still asleep. 

Pressed up against the cushions, she looks so fucking calm. She looks attached. Like every string making her up is tied to the ground. You’ve always resented Buffy for up and leaving you, but right now you feel so goddamn far away and she is painfully here. Not in the lap of some milquetoast army boy, not slamming your head against church stairs until your forehead bloomed with bruises, not spitting at you or chasing you to LA just to tell you that you’re not good enough for her to follow any further. Not anywhere other than here. And you’re everywhere.

Figures. The day Buffy Summers finally decides to run towards instead of away from you, you begin to come undone at the seams. 

You have got to stop thinking about this. 

Wearily, you reach for the frying pan. When Buffy wakes up, you tell yourself, there will be pancakes, drifting be damned. 

For now that’s gotta be enough.


	3. rooms with her in it

You’re so engrossed in the sizzling of the batter, the rhythm of the boiling oil, the care and reverence that somehow seems required, all of a sudden, for these pancakes to come out half-decent that it takes more than a few seconds for the sound of Buffy stirring to register. 

You turn yourself around, one hand still vicelike on the handle of the frying pan. She yawns, a slow, sleepy noise emanating from her pink, open mouth, like a disgruntled kitten. Because you’re stupid and weak and have the emotional constitution of an infant, your heart convulses violently in your chest at the sight. Buffy rubs her eyes, a tired performance of waking. And that’s when you realize, halfway through pancakes, fully head over heels, that you really don’t know what to do in this situation. 

Obviously you’ve had people in your tin-can before. You’ve had girls on the couches with their hair pulled back in pink scrunchies, big eyes and tight tube tops and artificial tanner. You’ve had boys in your bed that smell like shots and sweat and try to write their number on your open palm while you pantomime the embrace of sleep. But they leave. Always, inevitably. Even the girls who’ve never been pinned beneath another girl before, writhing and raking streaks of St. Tropez down your bedsheets, know that much. It helps that you’ve always been upfront about it. Even when they try to whisper sweet words and prayer in your ears, even when they stare at you with saucer-giant eyes, like you’re the whole world, like you’re someone worth writing a psalm about, you’ve been nothing less than stainless steel. You kiss hard and play hard and when you drag them out of whatever hole in the ground you found them in you tell them that your room is not a place for them to impose themselves in the morning. 

It also helps that the whole place looks shittier in the morning, as do you, and most of them want to maintain some plausible deniability. So they leave before the sun comes up. 

The point is, you think viciously in between sideways stares at a girl who actually is the whole damn world in herself, the point is that you don’t know the protocol for mornings. For breakfast. Existing in the vicinity of another person without the expectation of sex but rather of kindness is completely out of your fucking wheelhouse. And you’ve never been good at kindness, especially towards Buffy. As much as you want to be. You love her too much for that. 

Kindness makes the girl take off and leave. Something the two of you have in common, you suppose. 

“Sleep well, B?” You settle on, ignoring the racing of your mind like a train flinging itself frantically off even the very notion of tracks. Buffy blinks, strands of goldilocks curls clinging to her cheek, a thin line of drool plastered against her chin. “Like the dead,” she groans, with a sharp shake of her head, a physical attempt to decloud her brain. “Could’ve used a bed, though.” She intones, a sly, still-sluggish smirk spreading across her face. Your hand stiffens against the handle. 

Come on, Faith. You know this. You know how it works. You have literally been that girl, and still kind of are. She doesn’t like you. She likes the way it feels when she flirts with you, regardless of whether or not she knows she’s doing it. She likes the way the words feel in her mouth. Don’t lean into it. Kinsey zero, remember? 

“There’s drool on your face.” 

Bait successfully ignored. Buffy squeals, batting at her face angrily. “Ugh. Thought I got over that whole sloppy sleeping phase. Sorry about that.” You snort, still thrumming with nervous energy, the hot, meticulous sound of dough slapping iron grounding your traitorous, lovesick organs. “It’s chill. Want a pancake?” 

“Since when do you know how to make pancakes?” She asks, skeptical, and ouch, but also fair. “Since fifteen minutes ago.” You respond. “I’m a quick learner.” You resist the urge to wink, to bite your lip, to send your tongue darting in between your canines. 

You think of cardboard, of gum, of the scent of garbage in the ocean and salt in the sea. Even the aftertaste of spearmint, a physical sin, dragging against the roof of your mouth fails to stabilize you. 

Get it together, you raging asshole. 

Sea. 

Mint.

All your guilt and shame and the synonyms for those words you learned flipping through psychology books at boring parties. 

Unsexy things. Et cetera.

Buffy shrugs. Or at least, you assume she does, your eyes being stubbornly fixated on pancakes as they are. “Well, who am I to deny the fruits of your labor? Toss me one.” You spin around, a thin line of slick oil extending outwards from your point of motion. With your teeth gritted sharp, you toss, fat stacks of pancakes landing on beckoning paper plates. Buffy cheers, and immediately begins to dig in with her bare hands. You raise a singular eyebrow, in a way you tell yourself is decidedly not a flirtation. She flushes, body a landscape of pink and peach and the unfair intensity of color. “What? I’m a consumer. We do consumer-y things.” She says petulantly, fingers digging into soft batter, tongue darting around chipped nails. You drag your eyes away, a desperate motion, hot all over.

Trash in the sky. Trash in the sea. Trash in your veins, the thick line of pollution that makes up what you are. There is nothing less attractive than that, damn it, and even so syrup, sensation, and Buffy flood every receptor in your flickering mind. 

Pull it together. Gather up your strings.

With Herculean effort, you laugh, and you think you sound like a shrieking violin with the chords all busted to hell and back. Or something. You don’t know, you never played violin. “Preach it, B.” You comment, already hating the words as they fling themselves from your parted lips, hating the edge of it you inject into every phrase without pause, without fail, hating the subtle invitation and hating that it has to be Buffy that bears the brunt of your stupid, impossible come-ons. 

You try very, very hard to change the subject. To distract, from the sound your words make in the dark, before Buffy thinks about them in full. 

“So, what’s the plan?” You say cooly, lowering yourself onto the couch as Buffy continues to ravenously shovel pancakes into her mouth with bare fingers, looking every inch the starved man in the desert who just found his oasis. Between desperate mouthfuls, she emits a noise that you can’t even begin to parse. You wait until she swallows completely, face still slightly pink, and presses her fingers against the slope of her forehead. 

“I’m not entirely sure. I’m not one for the doing, right now. I kind of just want to sit back and let the darkness consume me, in a way that doesn’t sound totally wannabe emo.” Buffy says simply, nails still sticky, and you nod in something approximating understanding. She hesitates, hovering on the edge of indecision, before pressing forwards, cheeks stubbornly red. You gently gesture at her, nudging her forwards. She speaks. 

“I guess I just kind of want to talk? To someone? Nobody back home is capable of talking to me anymore. Like, god, I’m not some kind of glass figurine you have to handle with care. I’m better than that.” 

You smile, sloppy and stupid and entirely sweet on her. “Damn straight, B. So, what do you want to talk about?” 

She rolls her eyes, long and languid, a fluid motion containing an endless well of exasperation. “So much. Like the fact that I died, two times, and I still remember the sensation of being unable to breathe, dirt in my lungs, the feeling of my heart forcing itself to beat again! Or the fact that sometimes I’ll stare into the mirror and scrub my hands until they’re raw because I’m convinced there’s blood in there. Or the fact that I was 15 when they dragged me into this, 15 fucking years old, and I still haven’t gotten any better at managing myself. I figured you would know how to talk about those things, Faith.” 

You barely know how to talk at all, you want to tell her. You want to tell her that death doesn’t mean anything and hasn’t for a long time, that the fact that the fight will continue and redemption requires fighting is something you made your peace with a long time ago. You want to tell her that you do that too, the thing in the bathroom, that you scrape and scrape with the sound of pouring water in your eyes and nose and mouth until your knuckles are flushed red because you can’t forget jamming a stake into a concave heart and the weak spitting their guts on the ground. You want to tell her that she is radiant and that the dirt doesn’t do her justice, that you tried and you tried and you tried to bring her down again and again and again and at some point you gave up. Because Buffy Summers is always more than the dirt beneath your feet, always more than gutter trash and rainwater in the drain that you crafted yourself out of. Because you wanted her to be like you, and then she wasn’t, and so you needed to be like her, or for her to come down into the dark while you wept in your sleep. 

You want to tell her that when you were 16 you smashed your head against the pavement and you thought it broke, the cracking of an eggshell, the fragile separation of your brain from your humanity while you bleed until you ceased to bleed anymore, and how when you were done sobbing in your own spit you stood up and reached for your ruined forehead and shoved two fingers in the eyes of your vampiric tormenter, stained with your own blood as they were. You want to tell her that when you were 16 you bought a purple pen just to say that you knew how to write in girly colors, that you knew how to be a teenager, young and light and in love, and you wrote Faith Summers and Buffy Anne Lehane all over graph paper in scrawling script just because you could, and then when you were done you took the paper and ate it. 

You want to tell her that you don’t know how to live for yourself anymore, that you are what remains of her shadow, that you cling to her shoes and hope she trips and finds you. You want to tell her that it doesn’t get better, and the way you get out of it is by finding someone to be in love with until you’re sick from loving. 

You want to tell her she’s bigger than you, she’s bigger than literally anyone you’ve ever met, she’s the size of the world and the eyes are for her stars. 

You want to tell her that you only just figured out how to love someone in a way that doesn’t require you destroying yourself. 

You want to tell her all of those things, but she hasn’t stopped talking, and her voice is climbing, a fever pitch, the frantic nature of it all too familiar to you. 

You want to call her by her name. You want to say Buffy Anne Summers, and say it again, and again, and again. You want to tell her that every room was either one with her in it or one that lacked her. And that distinction is the only thing you are capable of remembering. You want to tell her that when you met her that first day and put on a show it was just that - a show - and that what you really are is the tenderness and weakness she hates being able to perform. 

You don’t say any of those things. Her mouth moves at the speed of sound, and instead of telling her what you know and what you need from yourself, you lean forwards and kiss her. 

You remember a thing Willow said, once, back when she was the size of a polly pocket and had a round-moon face. Love makes you do the wacky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i watched 116 episodes of hunter x hunter and forgot to update this fic have a chapter


	4. finale

You lunge for her in that moment, an act of something that is almost desperation, cutting through air in an attempt to reach her, gasping as she still is, words tumbling out of her mouth with the speed of a freight train and the frantic howling of blood and the wind. You’re not a stranger to this Buffy, the girl who spits nothing but her feelings, bitter and unformed as they are, and when you were young and stupid and first discovering the tenderness that laid dormant in your heart you used to revel in her, the feeling of dragging something out inch by inch from the pinkness of her mouth and letting it lay bare in the sun. But now that you’re older and marginally wiser, you see the hooks and barbs at the edges, the way it rips at her tissue and skin, and you want nothing more than to tell her that what she is is quite simply everything. The summation of you. Your blood and your now-lovely bones. 

You think that might be a bit intense for a straight girl, but you can’t help it. Everything about Buffy Summers is intensity to you, the soft sear of her flesh, the circumference of her waist, the vulnerability in her shadowed eyes. That’s how it’s always been. That’s how it’ll always be. 

Anyways, you’re flying at her, unparalleled in the cadence of your heart, as her hands flap even faster, and before you know it before you can even remind yourself to not be stupid, to keep things easy and simple like you fucking promised yourself in your bed just a night ago, that in spite of the darkness and the beautiful plantation of your face that you would not enter her fucked-up rotation, because no matter how much she might think it in a given miserable moment she doesn’t like you. She couldn’t possibly. But you’re ignoring that, forgetting that, a staccato of love (oh god, love? When did that happen? When had you begun to refer to your feelings with such tenderness) murdering your delicate ribs, reaching like she is the sun and in that sense utterly unreachable. A part of you doesn’t expect to make contact, not ever, just to spin around uselessly in her orbit until the end of time. 

But Buffy is tangible. She’s warm under your hands. 

Buffy starts, staring at you, but you don’t have the time to look in her eyes, lovely and round and gentle blue. All that you are is made up of her impending lips, and before you touch your mouth to hers you close your eyes. 

You think, instinctively knotting your hands in her hair, that this will be the last time that Buffy will ever see you as a confidant again. 

You’re used to kissing like an animal, like something vicious and cruel and inundated with want. And there’s no shortage of want with B, no shortage of desire to drown in her and everything that she is, which you figure is maybe a little fucked up of you, but hey, you’re more than a little fucked up. But right now that want plays second fiddle to a word you used to hate more than you hated yourself in vulnerability. You kiss her softly, slowly, as she stills beneath you, fingertips grazing her cheeks, her scalp, every inch of gentle skin. You want to touch her like she’s precious, which would be unthinkable in any other context but this is Buffy, this is B, this is the girl who makes your heart quiver like antique china in an earthquake and you already know you are doomed to love her until love is nothing but the sound your mouth makes to describe what you are when you’re around her. 

Beneath your kiss, Buffy is still. It hurts instantly to drag yourself away, fish-hooks in your stomach, internal chemistry entirely undone and boiling white-hot misery in your gut. And yet you manage, because it hurts even more to not know what the expression on her face is. You draw back and are greeted by a round, shellshocked face, eyes wet with premature tears, lips parted and slightly darker than usual. There’s something unimaginable in her gaze and with a pang of what feels like almost anger you don’t deserve to feel, you wonder if it’s pity. Pity for Faith and her stupid girlcrush on the stars. 

Another, smarter part of you reminds yourself that Buffy taught herself not to pity you a long time ago, in order to prevent you from getting away with too much shit. 

“Sorry.” You rasp, and you immediately hate yourself for saying it the way that you do, like a compulsion, like the words are only made for you to emit when you’re in her presence and nowhere else. “Sorry, B. You know I’m not very good at not wanting things. ‘Specially you.” Buffy bites down hard on her lip, a mirage of emotions you’re not talented enough to read flickering across her face like paints bleeding together. Her hands grip at her knees, and you realize somewhat belatedly that there’s syrup from her pancakes on your mouth now, sticky and golden and encrusted to your skin, and that simple thought nearly sends you flying with the extent of your affection for her, for this routine you were going to craft for her. You’re a fucking idiot, you think savagely of yourself, the salt in the wounds the only remedy to the human condition or whatever the hell it’s called at this point. 

“Ask me.” 

You blink out of your loathing and reverie, and Buffy is just inches away from you, sunlight and flushed knuckles and rosey skin. “It’s considered the polite thing to do,” and that sentence is drowning in challenge, of all things. “Ask me if I want to be kissed by you.” 

You laugh, frantic and miserable, your vocal cords instruments of sandpaper and grit against aching windpipe. “Are you fucking with me, B? Because if we’re talking politeness, jerking a girl around isn’t considered the peak of proper behavior either, last I heard.” Buffy only darkens further at that, a pointed stare penetrating what you imagine to be the thickness of your own goddamn skull. “Yeah, well.” She says breathlessly, wayward wisps of hair floating in a near-halo around her sunlit face. “I’m not exactly polite either. Now _ask_.” 

And of course, as per usual, you are incapable of anything other than responding to her pleas. For her, of course, but also for you. “Do you want,” you say, entirely serious for what feels like the first time in your life, electric down to your bones, agony and temptation stretching through the summation of your being like a bowstring pulled taut, “me to kiss you?” “No.” She says softly, and there isn’t even time for the parade of shame-hate-undiluted pain to take off in your abdomen, because she’s plowing on relentlessly, “ _I_ want to kiss _you_.” 

Buffy’s still so fucking quick, quicker than you, lighter. When the two of you fought together you always thought to yourself that she was dancing, gorgeous and sublime in her movements, while you were a goddamn tank of a girl, nothing but leather and blood and dark lipstick slapped shoddily over tarnished metal and vengeful gears. Apparently that hasn’t changed over time, because the way she moves, a slick arch of her back, is faster than bleeding, faster than dying, and certainly faster than your clumsy attempt to kiss first. 

Her lips are still sticky, but you suddenly decide that you don’t care in the slightest, not when they’re pressed up against yours like that, the sensation of her open mouth a gift you can’t imagine being deserving of in a million lifetimes. You breathe in and reciprocate, swallowing her hungry up in one twitch of your lips, cupping her jaw with your bare hands, giddy with the sensation of touching her and her touching you back. You don’t think you’re deserving of being touched the way she’s holding you, now, like you’re someone gentle and beautiful, but in between the dancing rhythm you’ve established it occurs to you that Buffy might consider you someone worth protecting, someone worth more than their hurt, the same way you see her. And that single, speculative thought alights neuron after happy neuron in your head, a landscape of flickering signals that all whisper to you words of love, life, light. 

You think you might be tired of punishing yourself. You think you might be tired, just in general, and you think that the vast expanse of your hurting should probably settle down pretty fucking soon. 

Buffy leans into you, and you can’t help but laugh a delighted laugh against her kiss. She pulls back and pouts, disheveled. “What’s so funny?” You can’t help but giggle again, everything bubbling up within you like warm champagne. In the last five minutes, you’ve figured out that Buffy Summers is attracted to you - fucking you, of all people - and that it’s not just a distraction for her. Buffy doesn’t tend to treat her distractions like glass sculptures. Giggling is a weird sound on you, clearly, because Buffy scrunches up her nose and pouts harder. “Do you even know how long I’ve wanted this, B?” You manage to gasp out. “How long I’ve wanted you?” And it’s not something you would’ve been able to imagine yourself saying in any other scenario, the openness and the rawness of it, but sitting here, staring into Buffy’s eyes, well. The truth is all you have to offer. The truth and your empty, reaching palms. 

She flushes, a soft exaltation, all of the air coming out of her like a balloon, suddenly pink all over. “I’m so stupid.” She says quietly, everything resembling a challenge gone, just the quick little touches of her fingertips to your hips, your shoulders, your chest, your open mouth, and the afterimages of her digits whispering across your skin, burning at you through thin layers of clothing, are entirely intoxicating. “I’m so stupid, I didn’t even notice, not your feelings or my own. I didn’t even know I could like girls.” 

You want to tell her that she can do whatever she wants, that she can exist on whatever plane she wants, and that you’re not going to leave her side, not anymore. You’re tired of running, bone-tired, completely and utterly finished with the distance you carved out in a stick in the earth from other people, important people, even Buffy. Especially Buffy.

You want to feel deserving of the gentleness of her ouch. 

You don’t tell her that. You lean in to kiss her again. 

You’re sure there’ll be questions you’ll have to sort out later, questions of how long she intends to stay and what you are, really, and what you will be lifetimes from now. But right now you two are the soft animals of your bodies, loving without question or doubt, and that’s the only thing the space around you is made for. 

(In the morning, you’ll go to the bathroom to wash up. When you do, blood will not be engraved on the lines in your skin, and that’ll matter to you, the absence of salt and the presence of a golden girl in your room.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that's a wrap! this was a bit of an experiment for me, as i'm not used to writing anything longer than a oneshot, but i think it turned out pretty well! everyone remember that faith and buffy are in love.


End file.
